Re: IRC client for Emacs

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

	* it's another special-purpose API

We will certainly make a special-purpose Lisp interface
for this important job.

	* Since the data is plain text, you either have to read the whole file
	  into memory to scan for the relevant data, or else generate a
	  separate index file.

Perhaps we want to have all the data in core--both the "original"
strings, and whichever set or sets of translations are actually in
use.  The method that was presented, with a symbol per message,
effectively does this, but does it in a rather inefficient way.

The program that Daiki <ueno@unixuser.org> sent also seems to create
a symbol for each string.  I am not certain, though, because
it has very few comments.

Daiki, could you see if it runs fast enough if you store the
message catalog as a simple alist?

It might even be fast enough to store the message catalog as text in a
buffer--and that would use up much less space.